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Jenna Lee, Leif Babin

Jenna Lee and Lt. Cmdr. Leif Babin are to be married Sunday evening in the chapel of the Old Glory Ranch in Wimberley, Tex. The Rev. Gary D. Fine, a minister of the Wimberley Christian Church, is to officiate.

The bride, 31, will keep her name. She works in New York as an anchor of “Happening Now,” a daily program on the Fox News Channel. She graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received a master’s in journalism with honors from Columbia.

She is the daughter of Janice and Robert Lee of San Francisco. The bride’s father retired in 1980 as a quarterback with the Los Angeles Rams of the National Football League, having previously played for the Minnesota Vikings and the Atlanta Falcons. Her mother retired as a first-grade teacher at Dr. William Cobb Elementary School in San Francisco.

The bridegroom, 35, was honorably discharged last week as a lieutenant commander in the Navy. He was the executive officer of a Navy Seal team in San Diego. Next month, he will begin studying for a law degree at Fordham. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md. He was awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart for service in Anbar Province, Iraq, in 2006.

Though living on opposite coasts, the couple crossed paths for the first time at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York in October 2008. Both were attending the Navy Seal Warrior Fund dinner, a fund-raiser for families of Seals killed or wounded in battle. Both had received a last-minute invitation and were assigned to Table 21.

“Immediately, I looked up and said, ‘Wow, he’s totally handsome, but not my type,’ ” Ms. Lee recalled. Commander Babin, who had not seen Ms. Lee on television, said he was struck by her “insightful questions and beautiful blue dress” (though she remembers wearing black that night).

As Ms. Lee was leaving, she handed him her business card, “just to be nice,” she insisted, adding that she had no romantic intentions.

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Still, she called her mother that same night to tell her that she had met an officer, whom she described as “a really incredible guy.”

And Commander Babin began telling friends he had met his future wife.

That prospect looked improbable, however, as his many dinner invitations in the ensuing weeks were rejected.

On a January evening, with the sun shining in San Diego and snow falling in New York, he called her and insisted that there was something between them, something she was afraid to explore.

After listening to him, she said simply, “Yes, you’re right.”

“Everything he was saying was correct, there was chemistry,” Ms. Lee said. “So we agreed to date.”

They began crisscrossing the country, until Commander Babin was deployed to Iraq in September 2009 for his third tour. He returned the following April, and they picked up where they had left off.

“I was worried initially how some might be critical of my relationship with Leif, how they might view it as skewing my ability to report on the war or the military,” Ms. Lee said. “But being in love with someone who is willing to die for their country actually taught me so much more than I ever thought. It made me a better journalist.”